Garden, Hinnom, and into the night

Of course I am a "few" days behind in my posts, but it is hard to sit down for any extended period of time here. You see, I am faced hourly with at least two options: I can sit down on a computer or read a book or do some research, or I can explore the old city of Jerusalem and see all the things that it has to offer. I do not often choose the former. This Sunday we spent the entire day doing a field study, basically geography and history class where the stuff actually happened, which meant that we would have no time for church on Sunday. Instead we went on Saturday to a jewish believers' church a short distance from campus. The service was wonderful. We sang songs in Hebrew, they had the Hebrew, the transliteration, and the english translation on the screen as well, and then the pastor preached in Hebrew and translated for himself into English. The whole ordeal was quite a site to see, especially since it went on for three hours :) After that we went north of the city to the garden tomb. Here's the picture of that place: the city is raging with people walking and driving - they drive like the people in Ecuador, meaning they're nuts - the streets are packed with people, it takes ten minutes to travel twenty yards through the gate. Then you come to the street the garden tomb is on and you're wondering if you found the right place because it is insanely noisy and busy; not exactly the place I would imagine for a church and memorial to the death and resurrection of Christ. But as soon as you get into the inner courtyard there is absolute silence. Of all the places I've seen in this city the garden tomb is the most peaceful, and none of the caos outside reaches the inside. I love how rapidly this place changes over just a few hundred feet.

Pictures:



This is a tomb much like the one Jesus would have "borrowed" - you can see the circle where the stone would have been and the rut along the bottom it would have slid on. This is all best guess work as far as exactly what it looked like.



The Place of the Skull? - they claim it was here, most say it was at the site of the Holy Sepulchre, but either way this hill looks a little like a skull so maybe, but it was a good visual non-the-less



This is all of us who went to the garden tomb. I mainly know the three guys on the right and the three girls in front of me, but I know the others decently well too - there's only fifty of us, which means a fifth of the school went out on this exibition




Completely unrelated: this is a BBQ in Hell - Geh Hinnom in Hebrew and Gehinna in Greek
The Hinnom Valley is right outside my window so I get to see it every day


A couple of the night shots I've taken: this is of the Temple Mount with the Dome of the Rock on the left and the mosque on the right - we were on our way to the Western wall, aka. wailing wall, which is the western wall of the Temple Mount



The road leading up to the mount of Olives. - what an awstriking view


PS- I put a video up online you can check out, but there is background behind it. The people here in Jerusalem know how to celebrate and they do it often. Every night there are fireworks in one part of the city or another or the Jews will have bar-mitzvahs during the day or people will dance in the streets at night - which is this video.